And while the rocket is still on the pad, NASA is trying to address that problem by repairing and replacing some seals before running tests to make sure all leaks are plugged, NASA officials said at a news conference Thursday. It is not yet clear how long it will take. Then there is the issue of certification. The US Space Force, an arm of the military, still oversees all rocket launches from the East Coast of the United States, including NASA’s launch site in Florida, and this area is known as the “Eastern Range”. Officials in the field are charged with ensuring that there is no danger to people or property in any launch attempt. And that means Eastern Range must also notify NASA that the missile’s Flight Termination System — a system that will essentially destroy the missile in midair if it deviates from its course and starts heading in a populated direction — is ready to fly. This system relies on batteries, however, which under current rules must be recharged at a nearby indoor facility before the newly proposed launch dates arrive. NASA hopes to obtain a waiver of this rule. But it is not yet clear when and if this request will be granted. If NASA does not receive this waiver approval, the SLS rocket will have to lift off the pad and return to the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building, causing more delays. “If they decide it’s not the right thing, obviously we’ll support that and we’ll pull back and look for the next launch attempt,” Jim Free, associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said at Thursday’s news conference. “But we will continue to push for the tank test,” he said, referring to tests NASA plans to run to fix hydrogen leaks while the rocket is still on the pad. The Space Force’s Eastern Range said only in a statement that it would “consider NASA’s request.” He declined to share details about the timeline. However, on Thursday, NASA provided some insight into what it discovered about the leak issue. The space agency had already revealed that there was an “inadvertent compression of the hydrogen line,” putting it under 60 pounds per square inch of pressure instead of the 20 pounds per square inch they had hoped for, said Michael Sarafin, Artemis Mission Manager. Saturday. It’s still unclear if this overpressure caused the leak, but NASA knows why the overpressure happened in the first place — and human error was involved. “Our management team apologizes [the operator in charge of overseeing the process] because we had made some manual process changes between the effort on Monday and the effort on Saturday,” Free said. “We practiced it during the week but they only had a couple of chances. So as a leadership team we haven’t put our operators in the best position we could have, we’re really relying a lot on our credit team.” That overpressure is definitely something NASA wants to avoid, according to Free. NASA is looking for a “kinder and gentler, if you will, loading process.” For now, there’s still a waiting game and a lot of “ifs” surrounding the launch schedule for Artemis I. The ultimate goal of this project is to fly the SLS rocket into orbit and deploy the Orion capsule, which is built for astronauts but will be flying on leave for this test mission. The capsule will orbit the moon before making the 239,000-mile journey back home. The Artemis I mission is just the beginning of a program that will aim to return humans to the moon and eventually land crewed missions on Mars. Nelson said the issues during the first two scrubs did not cause delays in future Artemis missions. CNN’s Kristin Fisher and Ashley Strickland contributed to this article.
